"Kodi" is an open source media player. Nothing more or less.

The problem comes because people sell boxes preloaded with Kodi and plugins that make one-click piracy possible.

Unfortunately the association that people make is now "Kodi = Piracy", which is very wrong.

And BitTorrent is a P2P file sharing program but it doesn't suddenly make the verb 'torrenting' mean anything other than piracy.

Kodi is a fantastic piece of software and it's a shame that their brand is being tarnished but c'est la vie when that's the biggest practical use case for your program. There's no sense for anyone other than the XBMC foundation to fight the river on this one.

What I would do if I was the project lead:

- Pick a new name or go back to XBMC since it still has plenty of mindshare.

- Implement a proper store for plug-ins and require signing for them to run a la Firefox.

- Let users sideload plug-ins by running in 'unbranded mode' and aggressively litigate people using your trademark for unlocked devices.

- Partner with manufacturers for an authorized device part of your store.

- Work with content providers to add official apps to your store a la Chromecast.

Your recommendations more-or-less came to fruition as the company Plex.

I find the dichotomy quite interesting. Fundamentally, there aren't too many differences between the two, and yet Plex has no stigma associated with it. It's a pretty limited space to work in. Long term, I don't see how Plex's business model works. Since they don't control the media, they don't really control anything. There's only limited appetite for transcoding software.

In my view that's one of it's strengths, they make a good product that is best in class for the their niche. I'm happy they're trying to expand with features rather than some content bid. Plex doesn't have a stigma because you can't use it to actually pirate content.

I don't think Plex will ever be a huge company but you don't need to be in order to succeed.

>best in class for the their niche

I find plex to be quite buggy and opaque. It is tolerable for the few things that it does, but that's mostly because it's a niche, and there isn't that much competition in this space. I don't know how emby is doing these days.

>trying to expand with features

Their expansion efforts are also not that scalable, again because they can't control content. They recently added integration with tuner boxes and dvr, but that whole segment is on its way out. Not to mention, various other issues with the inability to handle DRM and other copyright restrictions that come with cable. They also tried some cloud drive integration, which again didn't pan out, because they don't control the storage. I think they've tried to bundle some news and podcasts, which is marginal at best. In this space, I just don't see how you can make money unless you are selling content, storage or compute. Plex sells none of these. At the end of the day, it's some glue software that probably calls ffmpeg to transcode.

Plex relies on a backend server, on your LAN, to work. So you can't sell standalone Plex boxes, or if you did, it would have to include both the server and the client together, and the server requires a reasonably powerful system. A Raspberry Pi wouldn't be good enough.

You can run the server and client on the same box. It's just pointless for that use case, because Kodi can do that better. Plex is useful for transcoding for different clients. Besides, Plex is proprietary and can't be sold without permission. However, the point I was making was that all these things are for watching primarily pirated media, but Plex doesn't have the stigma. Plex was originally a fork of xbmc btw.

Plex doesn't have the stigma because you can't use Plex to actually pirate content. You don't really feel a difference between Kodi and it's plugins.

And yet, Plex is still used mainly for watching pirated content.

> aggressively litigate people using your trademark for unlocked devices.

This requires enormous amounts of time and money that the XBMC foundation doesn't have.

>Unfortunately the association that people make is now "Kodi = Piracy", which is very wrong.

Why is that association so wrong ? I mean, I would rather people fight fundamental issues like censorship on sales platforms for arbitrary reasons, instead of trying to sugarcoat it with stuff like, "yes, but it's only OSS software". For one, other than music, there is no real mass-market way to download DRM free popular media. Ripping your own DVDS/Blu-rays doesn't count, because that's still piracy (according to the US anyway). So instead of fighting the battle on whether this is piracy, and this isn't piracy, why not just say fuck it, and fight for the right to make and sell whatever device you want to and do whatever the fuck you want to with it.

Unfortunately the piracy users for kodi now far out-strip the non-piracy users and so kodi gets de-facto associated with piracy. Just like mp3 CDs and bit torrent, when the single biggest mass market appeal for your product is piracy then the product gets associated with piracy.

Is WinAmp a piracy player?

winamp and napster go hand in hand.

yes i'm implying winamp is piracy.

If it isn't, where are people getting the DRM free movies?

Quite so, they could just as well ban sales of mobile phones and computers since they also enable copyright infringement.

Shouldn't the title be FB bans ... sales on Facebook? It's good to remember that FB <> Internet and FB <> world.

Isn't that implied. If it said Walmart bans sales of Kodi, is anyone going to think they are banning it worldwide.

One would hope so, but not as FB would have it. e.g. internet.org. Safer to keep a tight psychological bound.

Does anybody think these clowns are actually going to be around in a decade? I can understand the business desire to censor political minorities to please the majority, but how does doing enforcement for the content cartels generate any goodwill from their users?

It will be interesting to see what happens when their surveillance archives go off to the highest bidder (and are subsequently leaked).

"Content cartels?" You mean copyright owners? I'm not sure the majority is on your side. A lot of folks, including me, generate copyright-protected content and are happy to see anti-piracy measures enforced. Facebook has other issues, to be sure, but I don't have a problem with this.

> happy to see anti-piracy measures enforced.

It's not an anti-piracy measure, they banned a specific brand of software to be sold with the hardware, Heck maybe they should ban Windows PC's because it's even more prevalent with users engaging in piracy and could just as well be sold with some pirated material.

Enjoy your bubble, while it lasts. It's [not] funny how every new "anti-piracy measure" seems more akin to precrime policing. This unrelenting insistence on invasive control is the heart of why copyright and the Internet cannot coexist.

I certainly think that many Hollywood companies are stuck in the stone age in many regards, but these devices are literally built for piracy (with the specific plug-ins, there are very legal uses of Kodi). You may have your own views on copyright, but I don't really see any rational argument for why someone should be able to profit off selling these devices.

Yes, the internet makes it easy to circumvent copyright, so then why don't people download this software themselves?

If you don't believe the `content cartels` deserve your money then why should someone random person installing free software?

It ends up having the opposite effect anyway. Now people will just buy a ton of Kodi devices. I don't think any majority of the country/world even cares about anti-piracy measures in any direction and certainly doesn't pay attention.

While I agree with your point, I think this bubble will stay afloat by pure ignorance alone.

So you give everything you create away for free? Hmm, how altruistic of you.

It's ironic that you accuse FB of banning political minorities after many revelations that they gleefully took lots of money from the US political minority (Republicans) in exchange for tailored marketing services, helping that minority take control of the entire federal govt.

Would you really call Republicans the US political minority in any meaningful sense of the word? Especially considering their representation in all three branches of the US government.

I don't really have a dog in that [WWE match], so I don't really care about the he said she said.

I was referencing how it is fundamentally impossible to please everybody all the time, yet centralized services put themselves in the position of having to try.

TIL that facebook has a marketplace.

This is brilliant marketing!

Built in React Native

All the fuss about Kodi makes me think I should get a box. Is it worth it?

Kodi makes BitTorrent only marginally easier to use. It integrates a VPN a little more seamlessly than a laptop running your general-purpose OS of choice. All this makes a much bigger difference for a non-technical user, but for the average HN commenter the benefits are much less obvious.

Kodi has one of the most arcane UIs I've used in years. Also, you need to find and set up plugins to get streaming going and this is a complicated process. The streams can be good but not worth all the hassle.

A younger more daring me set up SportsDevil back in the day (like a couple of years ago) so I could watch the Florida Gators play while living across the country. It was SUCH a pain to get a reliable stream. And even then, it was potato quality. With GoogleTV providing all the channels I need, and at a 35 dollar a month price, I can't see any reason why I'd go back to this route.

That’s because KODI is really just a media player with a plug-in framework.

The plug-ins are NOT part of KODI’s core functionality.

Although it could be argued the native stuff are plugins too, they are built on the same framework but source your media from locally attached storage (USB, SD card, HDD) or network server/stream (RTSP, SMB, FTP).

(At least with OSMC) the current default skin is terrible IMO, install the older Confluence skin and things are much simpler.

YouTube and twitch plugins work well for me.

In short: no. Kodi itself is the environment, the problematic work is done by plugins that look for free movie streams. It all takes longer than Netflix and other paid services. Nothing to get too excited about.

True, but not even including these streaming sideloaded plugins, what percentage of Kodi users are playing legitimate content?

And if more than 0%, where in the world are they getting the DRM free digital files?

If you want to try it, just get a Raspberry Pi and install it yourself.

Or just set it up on your computer.

I gave it a try, and found it clunky and annoying to use, so I've since built a solution that meets my specific needs.

If you have a huge media collection, maybe. It's just a convenient HTPC like setup that you can hook-up to your TV.

You can easily install it on an existing computer and try it out if you don't want to spend money right away.

Kodi is what used to be XBMC, once it was obvious a “10ft” interface was desirable beyond the needs of OG XBox hackers it was revised to run on PC (XBox is 99% a PC anyway).

Eventually nobody knew why it was called XBox Media Center when nobody really used it for the XBox. So they changed the name to KODI because it vaguely resembles REWIND STOP PLAY icons:

|< [] |> |

K O D I

So that’s a little history, but I still mourn the loss of legacy screensavers like the excellent ‘matrix’ and the native ProjectM/Milkdrop support which hasn’t isn’t present in the Pi version or newer PC builds for years AFAIK.

Anyway, this is like banning Chrome because you can go to a porno website.

Thanks for posting that explanation - it makes the official name mildly better. Although I'll probably just keep calling it XBMC.

I had thought it must be named after someone's baby brother.

Modding my xbox to run XBMC and play DivX rips is what got me into Home Theatre in the first place.

I now use an AppleTV 4K to stream UHD movies from a NAS. But the concept is the same.

No "wiretapping devices"?

I wasn't aware that people sold stuff on Facebook. But Facebook apparently has a store now. Never noticed.

Very odd. I can't imagine the rationale. "But you could watch pirated movies with it".... uh yeah, same for VLC, can I sell my Macbook on Facebook?

None of them have plain vanilla Kodi on them. If they did, Amazon wouldn't have a problem selling them - and probably no-one would buy them either.

They're all preloaded with insta-piracy plugins.

The media companies, especially in the UK, have been making a huge deal out of these so called “piracy boxes.” People have gone to jail for selling them in shops IIRC.

Yes, it’s ridiculous.

Cory Doctorow had a thing about this, I believe it was called "The coming war on general purpose computing"

Funny how they can easily and quietly manage banning Kodi yet stuggle publicly with removing blatent hate speech. Not saying they're equivalent, just that Facebook is perfectly capable of blocking things when they want to despite the free and open perception they try to create for the platform when they don't want to.

Their choice is strictly defined by the profit gain and loss calcs.